Marketing Dashboards: How to get value
As marketers, we develop strategies and tactics that attract customers to a business, brand or product. As individuals whose livelihood and professional reputations depend on our understanding of marketing, we know that clearly defined strategies are essential for success.
Most marketers spend countless hours, great sums of money and endless brain cells devising the “perfect” marketing strategies. Their goal being to get their messages in front of the right audience, at the right time.
Making sure our media and marketing efforts are relevant, sound, supported, and measured properly is the best insurance we can buy ourselves.
Dashboards can help you optimize your campaigns.
Dashboards provide a streamlined, visually appealing way to display data so that you can:
Keep a close eye on how your budget is being spent
Assess performance across multiple mediums and media
Identify gaps and opportunities in current campaigns
Expedite decision-making for real-time campaign changes
Offer valuable insights to management, clients and internal teams
Align marketing efforts more closely with overall business objectives
You may already be using a media planning dashboard software, but are you taking full advantage of the software?
Steps To Build A Dashboard That Works:
Get Your Story Straight: Marketers are storytellers. You work (read: live) to create captivating narratives. Of course, you care about the quantitative outcome of your efforts. But you also care about the feeling your collateral evokes with your audience. Building a marketing dashboard presents a rare opportunity to give meaning to all those numbers, lines, dots, and figures that come from data. It’s a chance to demonstrate impact, both internally and externally. Deciding the story you want to tell with your dashboard will dictate the metrics you measure, the filters you apply to your data, and the visual graphs and charts you create. Bragging is good for the soul.
Mind Your Metrics: Your dashboard is no place for applying a “kitchen sink” mentality. When it comes to the metrics you choose to use, be selective and specific. There’s an endless array of metrics out there; from impressions, CTRs, leads, conversions, and customer satisfaction to reach, TRPs/ GRPs, CPC, revenue, profit, and response rates.
Metrics to KPIs: Metrics mean a whole lot of nothing without proper context. Always compare metrics against KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Many will stress that “content is king” but in the world of data and dashboards, we can’t emphasize enough that “context is king”. Without context, you might think the 1,000,000 impressions your paid ads generated were phenomenal. But when you recall the campaign KPI defined success as 10,000,000 or more impressions, you’ll understand why 1,000,000 is actually not a good result.
Get Visual: Humans have been visual creatures since the dawn of time. That hasn’t changed just because we are relaying data; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. Creating a visually appealing dashboard is imperative if your goal is to keep your audience’s eyes from glazing over. There are many ways you can do this.These days, media dashboards are personalized with eye-catching colors, diverse chart styles (pie, line, bubble, bar, step), filters for selecting specific content and custom arrangements that are created by dragging and dropping charts where they’ll create the best information flow.
Highlight Key Takeaways: Let your dashboard communicate the successes you've had and the learning you've gained, but don't make the reader feel like they need to know every last detail.Graphics can be a great way to communicate metrics. However, consider creating a designated section with bullet-point takeaways. Keep it between 5 and 10 points so as not to overwhelm anyone.
With our tool, you get a comprehensive overview of all your marketing activities. Visualize your results to make the data-driven decisions you are not making today, and tell a better story using the powerful tools and data at your fingertips. Cubik helps you manage every step of your media management process. From briefing to results. There are hundreds of features wrapped into a user-friendly interface to make brands and agencies more productive. Whether your current software is falling short, you’re just getting started or you’re seeking a more streamlined all-in-one solution, get started today with a free hands-on demo of all the things we can do for you.
